In its first weekend on the market in Japan, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc.'s PlayStation 2 has reached 980,000 units sold. This initial sales milestone blows away the original PlayStation's three-day mark in 1994 by nearly 10 times. A total of 26,400 retailers in Japan, including 18,500 convenience stores, approximately 7,900 retail stores, current PlayStation retailers, as well as PlayStation.com (Japan) Inc., began selling the PlayStation 2 units on March 4. More than 600,000 units were shipped to and sold through Japanese retailers and 380,000 units were sold on-line through PlayStation.com (Japan). Due to a shortage of 8MB Memory Cards that are included in the PlayStation 2 hardware package, the company is experiencing about a 10-day lag in production. Work is currently under way to expand the manufacturing capacity for the 8MB Memory Cards, and total hardware shipments are scheduled to reach one million by March 15, and 1.4 million by the end of the month. Because of the current lack of these Memory Cards, separate sales of these units are scheduled to resume during the later part of the month. With more than 10 new titles, PlayStation 2 software shipments exceeded 1.3 million units for the weekend. In addition, DVD-video software sales increased between 2-to-4 times for DVD-video software retailers, and totaled 10 percent of software sales on PlayStation.com (Japan).
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
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